Fall Photos '08

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Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Slogging

a new word we learned while settling in A'Dam during the past 3 months. The english translation is...slow bloggers. Yes, we have not been blogging regularly but wanted to gather up all our stories for this edition. Big edition.

First, a foot update. Kiley has survived her first real Dutch experience in flying colors. The cast came off two weeks ago and she is slowly getting back to her speedy ways. She continues to bike around town (with or without the cast) and is quite good with her hand signals. School is out for the summer so a lot of her classmates (all five girls in a class of 18 kids) are spending their holidays back in their home countries. We talk about her friends from home as she really misses all of them--Avery, Alexis, Abby, Brandi, Kaleelah, Kaylee--but continues to make new friends on the block. A lot of the kids on our part of the straat only speak Dutch so they are learning how to get around the language thing. She is a huge helper around the house and does a great job watching out for her younger brother (who still thinks we are on vacation).

Our crib is coming together thanks to the creative eye of Jacqui and her memorizing every single page of the IKEA catalog with her trusty tape measure. She speaks in meters and actually knows what she is talking about vs Brian who has absolutely no clue (but doesn't have to since his bride knows the metric system). Speaking of the metric system, it will be coming to the U.S. shortly...

The great weather has allowed us to explore the city and taken in some of the local sites which has given us a pretty good feel of where to show people whenever ANYONE feels like visiting. Staked out some good local restaurants--Tai, Italian, Fancy, Cheap, Bad, Good, Dutch--Tulip garden, hot spots, dutch people, neighboring countries, bikes and parks. In fact, Jacqui has become such a local that she pushes a shopping cart full of groceries from our local super de boer right down the straat to our front door. Sorry if I am peppering in some Dutch words, they are the only four words I know so I thought I would show-off a little bit.

Our neighbor calls us "the Americans" as in--"Oh there are The Americans." Whenever we pull up to our house or come riding up, that is our greeting. Jeanette is a nurse in the emergency room and is quite funny. She just threw her own 50th birthday party out on the sidewalk (complete with a tent) so pretty much everyone was invited; even if you were walking through the party. One of our other neighbors is Dave who moved here 10+ years ago from California. Dave and his wife recently had a little girl, Annika, as well as two older "daughters" of the canine persuasion which Kiley adores. She actually was their dogsitter for a night and took this responsibilities quite seriously as they are very important to her.

Quinn is marching down the steps as we type announcing he only likes Scout because we are attempting to get him to sleep at 10:30pm night with the sun still hanging around (reference blog submission #2). "See, it's still daytime dad." Took about 7 minutes for him to fall asleep after reading his dinosaur book. He still likes to ride on the front of the "Boys bike" with his dad and announce to the people on the sidewalk that we are coming by. He also is the person giving the hand signals on the bike even if his left and right signals get confused some times. His other hobby is to say hi to most people walking by, then quickly ask them their name so he can launch into some story. He usually is able to keep an audience for a few minutes. One announcement he likes to make on a very regular basis is "I tooted." whether he did or not, whether the doors or windows are wide open and our neighbor's to our left are having dinner 6 feet away. According to Quinn, tooting is funny in any language.

Both children still have held onto their personal routine of grabbing your ears when she is next to you (Kiley) or scratching his arms and holding his hand when falling asleep (Quinn). Infant routines are great at any age or in any country.

We took in the European Championship Football tournament (happens every 4 years) which was amazing to experience. The entire city shut down and watched the Dutch national team advance into the quarterfinals. You could tell how the game was going by the sounds of the city.

We jumped in the car and took a family trip to Brugge, Belgium this past weekend. Great european city where the local language is flemish (Dutch launguage, just with a phlemish accent thrown-in), fantastic chocolate shops are on every corner and the world's best beer is brewed. 'nuff said.

The Europeans plan their summer holidays way in advance so we were quite late in the process by the time we arrived in early April. So, we had to first get Scout into a doggy boarding house and then work around those dates to get a place and airline tix which was not an easy task. We just finalized our August trip to Portugal and got pretty lucky this late in the game with a nice villa by the beach. We are now onto fall and winter as well as next spring so we've got to stop blogging so we check out the avails at scout's boarding house...